My name's Evan Narcisse and I'm here to make sure things
stay nice and nerdy while Mr. Coates is away. I'm lucky enough to get to write
about video games and comic books for a few places, like here and here. (I did
a gang of writing for this place but that's all over now. RIP Crispy Gamer.) As
a result of all that geeking out, I spend a lot of time thinking about what
makes a fictional construct resonate.

I've found myself fixated on a weird thought, lately: that
more video games should be like Ralph Ellison's great, great book, Invisible
Man. That's not to say that there needs to be more black people in 'em, though
that is a long-standing pet peeve of mine. What I mean by that is I've been
wondering why more games don't serve as good allegories. They could. Hell, they
should.

Lately, for my recommended daily allowance of non-illustrated prose, I've been slowly working my way through Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ellison. One of the reasons that Invisible Man ranks high on my all-time favorites list is that it delivers an almost hallucinatory walkthrough of all these different tropes of blackness. Invisible (the nameless lead character) runs from the South and winds up in Harlem, encountering characters that riff on Booker T. Washington's bootstrap acolytes, Communist agitators and Garveyite nationalists along the way. (I've always considered Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle--always close to the top of my literary favorites list--kindred to Invisible Man because it does a similar thing.)

Rampersad does a great job of giving readers a portrait of Ellison, showing us a man acutely aware of class struggle, racial oppression and critical theory. That awareness gave us a brilliant book. (Sadly, it also bred some crippling neuroses that arguably stopped Ellison from ever turning out another novel. But that's another story.)

But, in analyzing why Invisible Man works, Rampersad dissects how Ellison took elements from real life that he knew his audience would know and used them to build the world of the book. Rampersad offers that "major events and eras are ignored in Invisible Man. The Depression is not identified. Allusions are made to World War I, but not to World War II. These omissions deliberately boost the allegorical element so important to Ralph's aims." Furthermore, Ellison consciously used the language of symbolism to pepper in numerology and nomenclature that called back to a variety of classical sources.

The challenge Ellison faced in the book's final section, according to Rampersad, was "to place his 'epic' hero Invisible squarely in the midst of ... philosophical chaos and to find a way out for him that is consistent with human dignity, yet honest about the realities of American life."

What does all this have to do with video games? Well, after reading those passages in Rampersad's book, I wondered why more video games don't get me to ask such questions about human nature. I don't think it's a big stretch to look to pop culture as a source of allegory. After all, the myths that we now study in college were originally everyday entertainments, spread by word-of-mouth and changing with each re-telling. Comics go there sometimes, giving us yarns that reflect human nature. I'm thinking about the call-in vote to kill Robin in the late 1980s or a powerless Storm taking down Cyclops in combat for leadership of the X-Men. Identity Crisis showed members of the Justice League mindwiping their enemies to protect their loved ones, and choosing to do the same to Batman when he catches them in the act. These are the binding stories. We talk about them over and over again, trying to figure whether we believe in the rights and wrongs that they present to us. (To this day, if I find out someone called the 1-900 number to kill Jason Todd, I think something's wrong with them deep in their soul.) There's a certain amount of wondering, too, about what the pleasure or pain we take out of the stories says about us. Like, does the fact that his Japanese girlfriend cheats on him with a white guy make Ben Tanaka's white-girl fetish not quite as bad in Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings?

Where video games take an evolutionary step is by putting the reader in an authorial space that lets you affect the outcome. In a select category of games, the choices you make while playing make you think about choices you make in real life. Even in games where you don't get to influence the direction of story, a player can still see the ripple effect of their actions throughout the gameworld. So you can be the one that answers those questions, the one that creates your own meaning.

As a medium, video games do have some storytelling advantages that other forms of entertainment don't have, like the inherent sense of agency that comes from moving an avatar around. That alone eliminates a layer of disbelief. But, I don't play a lot of games that remind me of man's inhumanity to man or the way hegemony self-perpetuates. And they could. Hell, they should.

Lest y'all think I'm here just to gripe, one thing I can say is that I really feel like no medium does world-building better than video games right now. That's because these worlds aren't designed to be experienced in a unilateral fashion, like those of other media. Film, literature, television... they all require you to passively receive them. Even if you really dig into those texts, you can't change what happens in them. Video games are meant to inhabited, lived in and acted upon, and they act right back upon you as player. So, over the next few days I'm going to try to talk about some games that make you think about more than just saving this pane of reality and might just have the makings of modern-day myths. Or, fall flat on my face trying.

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

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We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

After the Times ran a column giving employers tips on how to deal with Millennials (for example, they need regular naps) (I didn't read the article; that's from my experience), Slate's Amanda Hess pointed out that the examples the Times used to demonstrate their points weren't actually Millennials. Some of the people quoted in the article were as old as 37, which was considered elderly only 5,000 short years ago.

The age of employees of The Wire, the humble website you are currently reading, varies widely, meaning that we too have in the past wondered where the boundaries for the various generations were drawn. Is a 37-year-old who gets text-message condolences from her friends a Millennial by virtue of her behavior? Or is she some other generation, because she was born super long ago? (Sorry, 37-year-old Rebecca Soffer who is a friend of a friend of mine and who I met once! You're not actually that old!) Since The Wire is committed to Broadening Human Understanding™, I decided to find out where generational boundaries are drawn.